The Women by Kristin Hannah
This novel is dedicated to the courageous women who served in Vietnam. These women, most of them nurses and many of them raised on proudly told family stories of World War II heroism, heeded their country’s call to arms and went to war. In too many instances, they came home to a country that didn’t care about their service and a world that didn’t want to hear about their experiences; their postwar struggles and their stories were too often forgotten or marginalized. I am proud to have this opportunity to shine a light on their strength, resilience, and grit.
And to all veterans and POW/MIA and their families, who have sacrificed so much.
And finally, to the medical personnel who fought the pandemic and gave so much of themselves to help others.
Thank you.
PART ONE
This war has … stretched the generation gap so wide that it threatens to pull the country apart.
—FRANK CHURCH
One
CORONADO ISLAND, CALIFORNIA
MAY 1966
The walled and gated McGrath estate was a world unto itself, protected and private. On this twilit evening, the Tudor-style home’s mullioned windows glowed jewel-like amid the lush, landscaped grounds. Palm fronds swayed overhead; candles floated on the surface of the pool and golden lanterns hung from the branches of a large California live oak. Black-clad servers moved among the well-dressed crowd, carrying silver trays full of champagne, while a jazz trio played softly in the corner.
Twenty-year-old Frances Grace McGrath knew what was expected of her tonight. She was to be the very portrait of a well-bred young lady, smiling and serene; any untoward emotions were to be contained and concealed, borne in silence. The lessons Frankie had been taught at home and at church and at St. Bernadette’s Academy for Girls had instilled in her a rigorous sense of propriety. The unrest going on across the country these days, erupting on city streets and college campuses, was a distant and alien world to her, as incomprehensible as the conflict in faraway Vietnam.
She circulated among the guests, sipping an ice-cold Coca-Cola, trying to smile, stopping now and then to make small talk with her parents’ friends, hoping her worry didn’t show. All the while, her gaze searched the crowd for her brother, who was late to his own party.
Frankie idolized her older brother, Finley. They’d always been inseparable, a pair of black-haired, blue-eyed kids, less than two years apart in age, who’d spent the long California summers unsupervised by adults, riding their bikes from one end of sleepy Coronado Island to the other, rarely coming home before nightfall.
But now he was going where she couldn’t follow.
The roar of a car engine disturbed the quiet party; car horns honked loudly, in succession.
Frankie saw how her mother flinched at the noise. Bette McGrath hated anything showy or vulgar, and she certainly didn’t believe in announcing one’s presence by honking a horn.
Moments later, Finley banged through the back gate, his handsome face flushed, a lock of curly black hair fallen across his forehead. His best friend, Rye Walsh, had an arm around him, but neither looked too steady on his feet. They laughed drunkenly, held each other up, as more of their friends stumbled into the party behind them.
Dressed impeccably in a black sheath, with her hair in a regal updo, Mom moved toward the group of laughing young men and women. She wore the pearls her grandmother had bequeathed her, a subtle reminder that Bette McGrath had once been Bette Alexander, of the Newport Beach Alexanders. “Boys,” she said in her modulated charm-school voice. “How nice that you are finally here.”
Finley stumbled away from Rye, tried to straighten.
Dad motioned to the band and the music stopped. Suddenly the sounds of Coronado Island on a late spring night—the throaty purr of the ocean, the whisper of the palm fronds overhead, a dog barking down the street or on the beach—took over. Dad strode forward in his custom-made black suit, crisp white shirt, and black tie, holding a cigarette in one hand and a Manhattan in his other. With his close-cropped black hair and square jaw, he looked a little like an ex-boxer who’d hit the big time and learned how to dress well, which wasn’t too far off. Even among this handsome, well-dressed crowd, he and Mom stood out, radiated success. She was old money and had always been at the top of the social ladder; he had climbed his way up to stand confidently beside her.
“Friends, family, recent academy graduates,” Dad said in his booming voice. When Frankie was young, he’d still had a hint of an Irish accent, which he’d worked hard to eliminate. He often touted his own immigrant mythology, a story of bootstrapping and hard work. He rarely mentioned the good fortune and opportunity that had come with marrying the boss’s daughter, but everyone knew. They also knew that after the death of Mom’s parents, Dad had more than tripled their wealth with his zeal for developing California real estate.